Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is selling the first tweet on the website - his own - as a non-fungible token.
The tweet says “just setting up my twttr”, which was posted on 21 March 2006. It has 130,000 retweets and 152,000 likes, at time of writing.
This non-fungible token, abbreviated to NFT, is a way for people to sell digital items as collectibles. They exist on a similar blockchain technology to bitcoin as a way to prove “ownership” of them.
Mr Dorsey put to tweet up to auction on a platform called Valuables. The current highest bid is $2.5 million from Sina Estavi, CEO of Bridge Oracle.
“Owning any digital content can be a financial investment, hold sentimental value, and create a relationship between collector and creator. Like an autograph on a baseball card, the NFT itself is the creator’s autograph on the content, making it scarce, unique, and valuable”, Valuable’s FAQ states under reasons why a person might wish to pay millions of dollars for a tweet.
“What you are purchasing is a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator.”
The tweet, like all tweets, remain the copyrighted property of the person who tweeted them unless they are, as in this instance, giving it away.
The tweet will remain on Twitter’s website, to be screenshotted for as long as Twitter decides to keep it up, which does raise questions about how much ‘ownership’ can be attributed to a digital property on a social media site.
Mr Dorsey’s tweet is not the only high-priced digital item to go on sale lately. Auction house Christie’s recently conducted its first ever digital art auction with work from Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, in a collection called Everydays: The First 5000 Days.
Grimes also sold $6 million worth of digital artworks in under 20 minutes, while the Kings of Leon have become first-ever band to release an album - When You See Yourself - as an NFT.
